Beedster

Agreed, but the day I looked they TNT wanted almost £80 to send a bass UK-UK insure, next day it was closer to £40, that's a hell of a market adjustment?

Is this the beginnings of the new Barefaced.......?

Do they change in line with (perceived) variations in the market or with simple workload Stew, there must be more to it than randomness?

Yep, that's the classic. A lot of RHCP tracks meet the criteria also, largely as a function of their modular approach to songwriting

I suspect the cartels have an even higher loss rate than Parcelforce

Interparcel's site can be a bit emotional, a few weeks ago it quoted me a really high price to send a bass via TNT, so I decided to try other sites. But for various reasons I went back to Interparcel the next morning and the same courier for the same package was back to normal price. I assume this was a tech or data entry problem, but it's happened a couple of times before as well.

I've used Shipley a few times https://www.shiply.com/lp/land/delivery?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc-brand&utm_campaign=Shipley. 90% of quotes will be very expensive, but on occasion you get lucky because one of the drivers bidding for the job happens to be doing the journey anyway, or looks at it and plans another visit at the same time (I had a guy deliver a bass to me from Hampshire who did it cheap because he was able to combine the journey with a visit to relatives). In my experience, if you wait around for a couple of days eventually a cheap quote lands for one reason or another. This is really useful if the item is hard to pack, or too large for a commercial courier etc (I had my 3m x 2m heavy studio desk delivered for £90, a commercial courier simply wouldn't have touched it, in part because the two Shipley guys had to go into the studio from where I bought it and carry it down a few flights of stairs). I also had a large number of used acoustic tiles delivered for virtually nothing, again, a commercial courier would have charged a fortune on account of the 'volumetric weight' (they weighed a couple of kgs but were about 2m x 2m x 2m). I will say that on the whole I still use Interparcel, and with a couple of exceptions - such as their recent failed attempt to charge me for alleged poor packing - prices are still good, and service times especially with TNT are still good. My major issues with couriers recently have been with incoming stuff that I've bought, often commercially as opposed to privately, but also with a couple of things I bought on here (including a rather badly mauled Mesa head). On more than one occasion with private sales the damage has been the result of the packaging being nothing like up to the task; a frequent disaster is people assuming it's OK to send a heavy item using the sort of rigid foam packaging that is used to protect flatpack furniture in very tightly and precisely engineered boxes, but which simply explodes into a thousand small polystyrene balls the moment it receives any impact in a box that it wasn't designed to fit. This, I guess, is a significant part of the reason that couriers make people pay for insurance, because so many people's packaging is complete pants

Yep, my sentiment also

A couple of Mesa combos do, M6/M9 IIRC, although I suspect they're now discontinued. You're right, it's odd that more don't, and even Mesa complicated things by using a different version of the M-Pulse 600 head in the Venture combo and stand alone rack-mount versions (sloping front versus flat front).

Tread very carefully with couriers at present, they're feeling the pinch and systematically albeit unethically handing it on to customers. I sent a bass to Walshy a while back, and the courier TNT tried to charge me a substantial surcharge for poor packaging. Luckily having been here before I photo every stage of the packing process, so I sent them the photos and notified them that I would sue their flipping derrières off should they choose to test my resolve in the matter. Oddly and almost immediately they discovered that it wasn't my package that had caused offence after all

Likewise

Classic post-Brexit sentiment

I would buy a cheap Jazz body and install the Nordie Split 51's. Cant lose

Good advice

Can't disagree with that

There is something very alluring about that design, and with a couple of Nordstrand Split '51s in there it would I imagine be something really special https://www.bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Nordstrand_Jazz_pickups.html

I was stuck with Garageband for a week when IT issues bought my Pro Tools to a halt. I found it absolutely awful to use, seriously clumsy. it might take time to learn Reason, or many other packages, but you'll find it's time well spent in the long run

The thing with email is that, whilst it's easy to miss or overlook an email in real time, it's a simple (once a week?) admin task for a business to check that all emails that needed a response received a response. Any business that doesn't make sure this is done is likely either missing out on business, pissing off potential customers, or likely both. Email is so easy to get right.